China is training geniuses to compete in math, science and AI

"Gifted" classes are controversial in the U.S., where schools like to pretend that all students are equally capable and all parents think their children are special.

In China, 100,000 high-scoring teenagers are chosen each year for "genius" classes, writes Zijing Wu in the Financial Times.

Those who qualify are coached to "compete in international competitions in maths, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science," she writes. "While others swot for China’s feared college admissions exams, the gaokao, those on the genius path have the chance to bypass that fate altogether, bagging places at top universities before they are out of high school, depending on their results in starry international competitions."

They go on to elite university programs and lead China’s science and technology sectors, notably AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing, Wu writes.

Chinese AI researchers are "world-class," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s Taiwanese-American CEO, last year. Many are genius-class graduates.

“The education I had growing up was extremely hard, but pressure and cut-throat competition makes one learn the best,” genius-class graduate Wang Zihan told Wu. “You feel like, after that, there’s no challenge in the world I can’t take on.”

Hoping to experience a different culture, Wang left DeepSeek last year to pursue a PhD at Northwestern University, Wu writes. He's not sure if he'll return to his homeland or try to stay in the U.S.

Genius-class students get a very narrow education focused on the subject in which they'll compete. Most do not qualify for direct college admissions, and must spend their final year of high school studying for other subjects that will be tested on the gaokao, such as English and Chinese literature.

Increasingly, the most talented students are focusing on computer science and technology, and competing in the informatics Olympiad. Many special classes have "AI" in the title, writes Wu.

Lou Tiancheng, the co-founder and CTO of Pony.ai, a robotaxi start-up, is considered China's top coder, she writes. "Lou credits the genius-class system with encouraging the kind of self-learning that helps students tackle the toughest problems, some of which even their teachers can’t solve, rather than rely on the rote learning required by the gaokao."

Dai Wenyuan, a 43-year-old genius-class graduate was an international coding champion 20 years ago, she writes. He founded an AI software business that has made him a billionaire in 2014, but "still coaches the coding competition team at his alma mater, Shanghai Jiao Tong University."

Wu was pressured into taking a genius-class spot, despite her interest in reading and writing fiction, she writes. She won a chemistry prize, got direct college admission and chose a journalism major, the only one in her class to reject a science major.

"Out of the 50 students in my batch, about one-third now hold senior positions at tech-related companies in China and the US.," she writes. "The others generally fared well too, scattered throughout finance, healthcare and academia."

She can barely remember the periodic table, Wu writes. "What does endure, though, is the curiosity to question, the discipline to reason and the courage to face the unknown."

At Stanford, 38 percent of students claim a disability. They're gaming the system to get better housing and extra time on tests, writes junior Elsa Johnson in The Times. It's very easy to qualify.

As a sufferer from endometriosis, which causes painful menstrual bleeding, she was given a single, so she could have privacy during attacks. She also was "granted extra absences from class, some late days on assignments and a 15-minute tardiness allowance for all of my classes."

Few are ashamed of their perks, she writes. "At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough."

Trying hard seems to mean something different in the U.S.